May 28, 2012

Now that's a letter to the editor

Warren Buffett's inkwell runs deep. When he talks, my ears perk up. I'm not listening to him for investment advice (my life is verbs and pronouns and chasing stories and photos). Instead I listen to Warren Buffett because he’s intelligent, reasoned, is a good story and believes in good things. He’s a builder.

It's a messy information world out there with a lot of competing voices and views and I don’t know if Warren Buffett is right or not, but he has a fine track record.

Our media world continues to change, at a pace that's impossible to keep pace with. There’s a lot of guessing and praying going on. There are tablets and handhelds and super G and triple backflip Bluetooth and I’m told we’ll all be wet-wired soon. It’s a big, confusing sandbox and we need to play in it. One thing I do know: newspapers work, they are read and they have a bright future.

So does Warren Buffett and he’s put some more skin in the game. In 1977 he bought The Buffalo News (you can see the News building when you cross the border from Canada into the U.S. at Fort Erie’s Peace Bridge. Drive the highway about one minute and look west).

Last week he announced an investment in the ink and paper trade and this summer his group will own 26 daily papers – they are part of a larger purchase of a 63-newspaper group, including his hometown paper.

He likes newspapers and likes how they build community. I like his formula for a successful paper – it’s not all that complicated. He outlines some of his recipe here:

“That will mean both maintaining your news hole — a newspaper that reduces its coverage of the news important to its community is certain to reduce its readership as well — and thoroughly covering all aspects of area life, particularly local sports. No one has ever stopped reading when half-way through a story that was about them or their neighbors.”

Warren Buffett wrote a letter to the editors of the paper's he's about to acquire and you can read it here: Buffett's letter

Spec Editor-in-chief Paul Berton has attended one of Buffett's annual general meetings and follows Buffett. He wrote about it in his weekly Spec column and I've linked to it here.